Charlie's Angels

So come Sunday morning (well afternoon, let's be honest), after some healthy drinking the night before and a 3am visit from the Pizza Fairy, we went to Charlie's for breakfast. Charlie's dining room area sort of looks like the parlor of a Victorian whorehouse, if said whorehouse had impossibly high shelves containing books no one will attempt to read.

I don't actually know what a Victorian whorehouse looks like, but I walk into Charlie's and think to myself that this is exactly how the parlor of one would be; this is the same dark wood, wallpaper and impossibly high shelves I would be nervously looking at while I tried to avoid the coquettish glances of remarkably and uncomfortably dressed ladies of the night. I would sit properly straight, hands on knees, perspiring through my obligatory wool suit and looking up about 14 feet to wonder if anyone had ever read that omnibus edition of Dickens' classics while powdered ladies did their thing.

But me and Biff and Nikki 2 K's and Jen Jen the Panda Girl made our breakfast decisions, drank our beverages and talked about stuff. At one point in the conversation, the small little lamp next to me flickered off and back on. I could tell by that look in Jenny's eyes she was suspecting supernatural means. It had crossed my mind briefly, but I quickly dismissed it as faulty wiring.

It reminded me though of one night wandering around a part of San Francisco all done up on some form of hallucinogens. This was down by San Francisco State University where the city begins to be overgrown by the jungle of suburbia. I walked down Brotherhood Lane, in a tripping group of three, passing churches and floating on a religious symbolism high when street lights began going off one by one as I passed them.

Seriously, this was not something that I was hallucinating, lights shutting off in a line as I passed them. I began to think that this was probably a bad thing, that extinguishing light was symbolically sinister. But then I rode out of a persecution moment, straight on into an ego fixing, savior complex where I thought maybe I had become so bright in spirit that there was no need for these manmade lights anymore.

Whatever dude, I was high.

So, that memory flashed momentarily and I let it sink back into the mire. We went on talking and eating, I saw the Color Man come in, I pondered the sex of the coffee carrier and finished my ice water like a good boy. But as we were leaving I was saying something mildly blasphemous, as I'm wont to do with a belly full of eggs and potatoes, when the little lamp once again flickered out. Jenny got that look in her eyes again, and this time I believed it too.

The little light didn't come back on again until I apologized.